Scientists claim that the remains of skeletons found in a castle well belong to a character from an 800-year-old saga. UNN writes about this with reference to CNN.
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Researchers have linked the identity of the skeletal remains found in the well of the Norwegian castle Sverresborg to an excerpt from a centuries-old Norwegian text.
The 800-year-old Sverris saga, which tells the story of the real-life king Sverre Sigurdsson, includes a description of the body of a dead man-later known as the "Well Man"-being thrown into a well during a military raid in central Norway in 1197.
According to the text, it is likely that the attackers threw the body into the well to poison the main source of water for the locals, but the saga says nothing more about the man or who he was.
The researchers first discovered the bones in the castle's well in 1938, but then they were only able to conduct a visual analysis. Now scientists have a range of analytical methods at their disposal, including genetic sequencing and radiocarbon dating.
A new study of the remains, published in the journal Cell Press iScience, reveals unprecedented information about the appearance of Well Man based on an in-depth study of his dental samples.
This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found. There are many such medieval and ancient remains throughout Europe, and they are increasingly being studied using genomic methods
- said study co-author Michael D. Martin, professor of natural history at the University Museum of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.
The findings not only shed new light on what Vel-man looked like, but also who he was, with an unexpected twist on how he came to be in the Norse saga.
Recall
Ancient settlements and evidence of agricultural activity have been discovered at a quarry in Lincolnshire. Finds include pottery, animal bones, and seed samples dating from the Neolithic to the Saxon period.